Saturday, August 13, 2016

We failed

And
so ends the great populist uprising of our time, fizzling out
pathetically in the mud and the bigotry stirred up by a third-rate
would-be caudillo named Donald J Trump. So closes an era of populist
outrage that began back in 2008, when the Davos dream of a world run by
benevolent bankers first started to crack. The unrest has taken many
forms in these eight years – from idealistic to cynical, from Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party – but they all failed to change much of anything.

And now the last, ugliest, most fraudulent manifestation is failing
so spectacularly that it may discredit populism itself for years to
come.

It seemed for a time that at least the Bernie campaign might generate some momentum toward eventually wresting the Democratic party away from the banksters and oligarchs. Tom Frank isn't optimistic about that now.

My friends and I like to wonder about who will be the “next Bernie
Sanders”, but what I am suggesting here is that whoever emerges to lead
the populist left will simply be depicted as the next Trump. The
billionaire’s scowling country-club face will become the image of
populist reform, whether genuine populists had anything to do with him
or not. This is the real potential disaster of 2016: That legitimate
economic discontent is going to be dismissed as bigotry and xenophobia
for years to come.